It is very common with metropolitan of India that an auto-driver refuses to take you to your destination or does not follow meter installed or over charge from customer. Now, Delhi Traffic police is advertising the complaint policy and also started message service in which you can complaint about auto-driver by just noting his auto-rickshaw number and SMS to 56767. There is not only this step that you can follow but you can also use help of popular social networking sites like Facebook and twitter.

Steps to complaint against Auto-driver:-

1. SMS to 56767- if auto rickshaw refuses service, harasses in any way, does not go where you want to go, you can complaint by using Delhi traffic police SMS service. Send SMS OVC or MIS or HAR vehicle Registration Location Time> on 56767.

Eg. Send SMS <REF DL1RC3000 Janapth 1000hrs> to 56767.

REF-Refusal –If auto-driver does not allow you to take any where, you can use this code to send SMS.

OVC- Over Charging-if an auto-driver charges without measuring meter and over charge from you, you can use this OVC code to send SMS.

HAR- Harassment-If an auto-driver harass with you, you can complaint immediately to Delhi Traffic Police. For, harassment, the auto-driver can more hard punishment than any other complaints.

2. Use Helpline Number- If problem is worst for you while travelling in an auto-rickshaw, you can immediately call on 1095 or 25844444. It is 24×7 started helpline by Delhi Traffic Police and complaint will be listened and reacted as soon as possible.

3. Follow Social Networking Sites– You can also register complaint later on against the auto-driver. Only you have to note down his auto-rickshaw number. Page on Facebook is Delhi Traffic Policeand follow on twitter – @delhipolice2.One can also use an email address-cp.neerajkumar@nic.in provided by Delhi Traffic Police.

4. Online Complaint Card- You can use online complaint card started by the Delhi Traffic police on their website. One has to fill all details related to complaint and can also mention brief description of 100 character against auto-rickshaw driver attitude.

Delhi Traffic Police has decided to take action against auto-rickshaw drivers within 24 hours of complaint registered. They are also working out on modalities to send an auto-generated text message to the complainant, acknowledging the receipt of the complaint along with a complaint registration number, so that he/she can follow up on the action taken.

Houses Demolished just Before Start of Monsoon, Thousands Left to Fend for Themselves

Mumbai, June 4: With the onset of pre-monsoon, the slums in Mumbai have been witness tobulldozers and police brutality as today i.e 4th June saw bulldozers moving over the houses at Ganpat Patil Nagar, Sanjay Nagar, Indira Nagar, Adarsh Nagar – Mumbai. Around 250 houses were demolished at Ganpat Patil Nagar and more than 300 houses were broken down at Adarsh Nagar-Indira Nagar & Sanjay Nagar. As always, the police force was present in huge numbers and disrespectful to the protestors that included men, women, children and the aged, even the pregnant ladies were not excused of high handedness. With the onset of the monsoon, the vulnerability is increased as these families have no roof over their heads and their belongings either crushed or lying here and there.

The demolition drive at Ganpat Patil Nagar was done under the pretext of ‘protecting mangroves’ as per the orders of the Bombay High Court which not at all had said anything about demolishing slums. The over enthusiasm shown by the local MLA of Shiv Sena – Vinod Ghosalkar in demolishing this slum and evicting the families from the land exposes the nexus with the land mafia which wants to transform this locality into high rise buildings and towers. Even the Forest Department has informed that they do not want for demolition of slums but only protection of mangroves.

At Indira Nagar, Adarsh Nagar & Sanjay Nagar, the demolitions were done under the excuse of widening the nala (sewerage) but that remains an excuse only as last year also, during the same period a demolition drive was undertaken for the purpose of expanding the nala which never happened. Activist Siraj Ahmed was detained by the local police when he led the slum dwellers in protest to the demolition.

Most shocking and deplorable is the fact that in January this year, no less than the Chief Minister of Maharashtra & Chief Secretary had promised to under take a survey of the these settlement for the purpose of declaring them as slums and provisioning of basic amenities. Instead of water pipe lines and toilet blocks they have sent bulldozers and police force. It seems that the slogan of ‘slum free india’ is to be realised by bulldozing the existing slums and not be upgrading or resettling them.

It is apprehended that the demolition squad might again come tomorrow, though the slum dwellers are firm in their resolve to resist and fight against the bulldozers as well as the rules that make such deplorable acts possible.

but police REFUSED to register a crime

A 23-year-old woman was allegedly gang-raped by three persons in Gurgaon for a period of over four months.

The incident came to light when the victim approached a local court which directed the Gurgaon police to register a case of rape, criminal conspiracy and kidnapping under sections 376 and 506 in the Sector 5 police station on Saturday.

According to police, the victim had come into contact with one Pradeep Kumar, a resident of Nangloi, on November 12 last year.

“Kumar had contacted the victim as a call centre representative over the phone. He assured her to provide her a job in a call centre. When she met him the first time at Gurgaon’s Rajendra Park area, the accused took her to a rented house in Nangloi after telling her that some preparation was required before the interview.

“When Kumar reached his rented accommodation in Nangloi, he was joined by his brother Kedaar and cousin Neeraj and all the three raped her one by one at gunpoint,” investigating officer Rashik Lal said.

Kumar later forced the victim to marry Kedaar after threatening her with dire consequences if she revealed her ordeal.

All the three accused then raped her again and again over months. One of the accused always remained present with the victim to keep a watch on her.

However, the woman managed to escape from the Nangloi house on March 15 and reached her home in Laxman Vihar in Gurgaon.

The victim’s family then approached the Gurgaon police, who allegedly refused to register an FIR. Finally, the woman approached a local court and after the court’s direction, the police registered the case.

“We arrested the prime accused Pradeep Kumar from his house on Sunday while Kedaar and Neeraj are on the run. A team has been constituted in the matter and we will nab them soon,” Lal added.

By Pritha Kejriwal & Sayan Bhattacharya, Kndle Magazine

Professor with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sherry Turkle has continuously explored the psychological dimension to human-technology relationship. In this age of simulated sex, 3D and sociable robots, are we headed for a new meltdown? Have we lost conversation? A ten minute time that stretched into a half an hour long conversation, that could have stretched further, if not for the appointment diary.

In reference to your book Alone Together, when do you think this complete dependency on technology happened? If you were to analyse that, why did it happen? Late capitalism or just our vulnerabilities…

Well I think it sort of took us by surprise, I mean I see there is something very specific about this technology. I think it seduces us in very particular ways. I’m not talking about all technology, I’m talking about our vulnerability to a very particular technology and the very particular technology that I’m talking about makes us three offers we can’t refuse. One that will always be heard.Two, that we can put our attention to wherever we wanted to be, andthree, that we never have to be alone.

And it’s that third offer, that we never have to be alone that turns out to be extraordinarily seductive in ways that I don’t think people ever had a chance to think about or anticipate because people always had to be alone before this. And now people are at a point, when given that possibility of never having to be alone, people start to not be able to tolerate people alone. I mean I study people at traffic lights, when it’s red, they pull out a device. I study people at STOP signs, they pull out a device. I study people at the check-out line of the supermarket, they pull out a device. So there’s a new total intolerance for the experience of being alone. I study people who think they can’t have a thought without texting it, a kind of dependence, I call it “I share therefore I am”. So my own particular theory of this work, this technological moment really centres around our vulnerability to particular affordances of digital technology and the way it captures us, given what it’s offering us right now. It doesn’t have to do with larger network social analysis, it has to do with the affordances this technology and our psychological vulnerability to what it offers and it turns out that we’re so vulnerable indeed to the point, that I think it’s changing the way we think, the way we relate to each other, the way we allow our children to grow up, the way we are tending to each other, the quality of our relationships in a way that I don’t think does justice to who we are.

Is this the intolerance towards being alone or is it that we are becoming lonelier and getting into a vicious cycle?

I agree that there is a vicious circle and I think you are right. You could say that our situation, our lack of community makes us more lonely and so we leap on a device that gives us an illusion of companionship, without the demands of intimacy. I wouldn’t want to say that there isn’t a piece of that in this dynamic but I’ve also watched environments with a strong sense of community, dissolve with the advent of this technology. So I’m not personally convinced of an analysis where we were lonely and thus jumped on technology that solved our problem really in the form of a symptom because when you watch community college students living in a dorm, who now don’t want to have conversations with each other.

How problematic is that? Why are the communities breaking down?

An analysis in terms of loneliness, a sort of a working class loneliness where these kids are literally living in dorm rooms and don’t want to talk to each other, you are left with that seduction of being able to hide from each other, even as we are constantly connected to each other, the comfort of being in control, a question of why we need that kind of control, you know what is there about that kind of control that is so appealing is one that plagues me.

To kind of highlight the superficiality; some time ago, at a conference, this lady who is a tribal activist in our country and who has been doing a lot of on ground work to fight against this takeover of land by the corporates etc. she said that “my Facebook friends are increasing by the day, you know I have like a 1000, 2000, 5000 friends on Facebook and the more friends I have, there are less and less friends with me to work on the ground”…

Well, that is my analysis and that is basically what I’m saying. Politically, this concerns me because in my country where I’m very politically active, people feel that political action means “liking” something on Facebook and I’m concerned with people going door to door in for Barack Obama and instead they’re going to a website and “liking” it. I’m trying to get them to drive 3 hours to go to Hampshire. It’s ironical that I wasn’t in America during the elections but I spent the last 8 months on the election and getting people to go to New Hampshire for the election, getting young people to go has not been easy. But they like the logo on the website and they think that’s political action. So that is very concerning and this is a different problem that people begin to think that if you are doing something, you do it online, that’s a different problem and of great concern to me.

Coming back to the sociological part of it, since we are talking about Facebook. At least in the cities we keep hearing about relationships breaking apart because of a certain update, but we also hear about old friends coming together thanks to Facebook. So on one level, do you think social networking brings about a level of transparency?

What do you mean by transparency?

As in maybe without the availability of Facebook, a wife wouldn’t be able to know that her husband is cheating on her…

You see things on Facebook that you wouldn’t see otherwise, yes… Hmm. (pauses). But what a way to get transparency! Like Tiger Woods was caught cheating on his wife, you get to know who’s cheating, you get to see, you get to stalk ex-boyfriends, ex- husbands. There’s got to be a better way of having transparency in relationships, that’s not what Facebook is for. The internet, email, Facebook, texting; it’s not a way to have conversations. I cannot be convinced. It’s a way to keep up with friends, it’s a way to share activities, updates, photos, going on’s, it’s a way to maintain relationships with far flung people. It’s not a way to sit down and get close. Now saying I get to find out if my husband is cheating on me because I can friend him on Facebook, this is not what Facebook is for, I mean that can’t be a plus, I really don’t want to go there.

And there are people taking up different personalities online…

Even Facebook, forget about multiple personalities, the point is that when you do a profile, you are putting forward your best self and we get used to putting forward a persona instead of our self in all our complexities.

That’s one side of it but there are also people, for example celebrities whose entire lives are on Twitter or on Facebook, minute by minute account…

Ya but that’s not necessarily them. I know people who have hired somebody to be their PDA’s- their Personal Digital Assistants. Initially PDAs were like your smartphones or something, now the PDAs are your Personal Digital Assistants where you hire somebody to do your Tweeting for you, do your Facebook for you. When you’re a celebrity, many people are never doing their own stuff. You think Barack Obama, instead of being the President up there, he sits around all day doing his Twitter for you? So you hire a professional to be your online self. It’s a full time job.

Why this urge to make the private completely public?

This is because having a digital persona has become a part of the new social presence and that is the new way of serving our identity. People don’t feel fully a part of the mix unless they have that account. People expect me to have a blog, I don’t have a blog. I need to have a life so when I say “I don’t have a blog, I have a life”, so they say “why don’t you hire somebody to do your blog for you?” It is expected of me to have a blog. Because I have a life, I try to go to the gym, I try to do my work, my research, reach out to my students, I have to write my lectures, but not to have a blog for somebody like me or that I don’t really have a Twitter feed, I log into my Twitter account probably once a month. It’s like not doing these things are considered socially unacceptable. So this is part of the new digital identity and I don’t think these are mysterious questions. To me this is just part of the immediate changes and new forms of expression that have become easy, have become available and people would use them. I don’t think that’s surprising or mysterious, I think the more interesting questions are, what people choose to use them for and and what the cost is.

So I know perfectly well that if I had a blog, I wouldn’t do my serious writing because I wouldn’t be able to do the kind of writing and the kind of thinking I need to do or the kind of research and interview. If we’re all going to be blogging, people like me are not going to be researching. My concern is not that “oh we have this new medium and a lot of people want to use it”, my concern is that there needs to be some people who say “well, we just think about this effect” and I know that you can’t be a professor, a mother, have a personal life, blogging every day and doing my kind of research. So I don’t think that the mystery is that this new thing is there and a lot of people want to use it. I think it’s more that people need to centre on their priorities and know that what their capabilities are.

Like you said that it’s important to learn how to be alone so that you don’t feel lonely…

I mean solitude. It is only if you have the capacity of solitude, which is the capacity to be with yourself and to gather yourself that you have the capacity to connect with other people and really experience them as others. You just don’t turn to other people to make yourself feel whole and you use them the way I write about it in my book. It’s like using the spare parts to make yourself feel whole and that’s not a relationship. The trouble with connecting with everybody all the time is that everybody is just using other people as spare parts and if you don’t teach your children to be alone, they’ll only know how to feel lonely. So the link between solitude and capacity to have conversation is important.

Just as we let capitalism have its way and the Laissez-faire, it just had to be the way it was and then we saw a meltdown in 2008 where everything just crumbled and this internet revolution, this Face-booking, seems to be connected in some way. Do you see that if we let it be just the way it is going – this entire lack of intimacy, this breaking down of personal connections etc. will there be a meltdown here as well?

What I think the danger is for me, for young people is that when you have conversations with other people is when you learn to have conversations with yourself. So it’s not just that I want people talking to each other, I want them to have the capacity of self-reflection. So the meltdown is going to be a generation of young people who don’t have the capacity for self-reflection and the capacity of a conversation, empathy, listening, now what does a meltdown like that look like? It’s not like a fiscal cliff, it takes the form of a discourse in relationships and more. The kind of meltdown I see, that you could observe is more in the area of my work. It’s more political where I talk about the fact that when we use emails and when I study companies and institutions where in order to get a quick response, we ask each other simple questions to get simple answers. So we dumb down our whole discourse, it’s like we put ourselves on cable noose. I think that’s an interesting point. That’s more how I see a kind of danger that you could actually, physically and I think you see that politically as well, where we start to dumb down our political conversations, we start to dumb down the way we talk about global warming, we start to dumb down climate change, we start to dumb down when we talk about economics, we start to dumb down when we talk about migration. We talk about these things in sound bytes because we are almost like intolerant of the long form. There is a sort of sense that “let’s move this along”.

Finally, if Sylvia Plath were alive, what would she make of multi lifing because she writes in Bell Jar “I can’t live all the lives that I want to, I can’t read all the books that I want to, I’m very limited by my individual identity”…

You mean, she could go on the internet and be many identities? That’s a speculation! I think the question is whether or not on the interne,t she would find the richness of the identity and be satisfied. Maybe 15 years ago I think it would have been very thrilling to her and in the end I think she might have found the richness of the identity, not on the internet but I don’t want to speak for Sylvia Plath.

We, the undersigned, are writing to demand swift, comprehensive and effective action addressing the representation of rape and domestic violence on Facebook. Specifically, we call on you, Facebook, to take three actions:

Recognize speech that trivializes or glorifies violence against girls and women as hate speech and make a commitment that you will not tolerate this content.

Effectively train moderators to understand how online harassment differently affects women and men, in part due to the real-world pandemic of violence against women.

To this end, we are calling on Facebook users to contact advertisers whose ads on Facebook appear next to content that targets women for violence, to ask these companies to withdraw from advertising on Facebook until you take the above actions to ban gender-based hate speech on your site. (We will be raising awareness and contacting advertisers on Twitter using the hashtag #FBrape.)

Specifically, we are referring to groups, pages and images that explicitly condone or encourage rape or domestic violence or suggest that they are something to laugh or boast about. Pages currently appearing on Facebook include Fly Kicking Sluts in the Uterus, Kicking your Girlfriend in the Fanny because she won’t make you a Sandwich, Violently Raping Your Friend Just for Laughs, Raping your Girlfriend and many, many more. Images appearing on Facebook include photographs of women beaten, bruised, tied up, drugged, and bleeding, with captions such as “This bitch didn’t know when to shut up” and “Next time don’t get pregnant.”

These pages and images are approved by your moderators, while you regularly remove content such as pictures of women breastfeeding, women post-mastectomy and artistic representations of women’s bodies. In addition, women’s political speech, involving the use of their bodies in non-sexualized ways for protest, is regularly banned as pornographic, while pornographic content – prohibited by your own guidelines – remains. It appears that Facebook considers violence against women to be less offensive than non-violent images of women’s bodies, and that the only acceptable representation of women’s nudity are those in which women appear as sex objects or the victims of abuse. Your common practice of allowing this content by appending a [humor] disclaimer to said content literally treats violence targeting women as a joke.

The latest global estimate from the United Nations Say No to Violence Campaign is that the percentage of women and girls who have experienced violence in their lifetimes is now up to an unbearable 70%. In a world in which this many girls and women will be raped or beaten in her lifetime, allowing content about raping and beating women to be shared, boasted and joked about contributes to the normalisation of domestic and sexual violence, creates an atmosphere in which perpetrators are more likely to believe they will go unpunished, and communicates to victims that they will not be taken seriously if they report.

According to a UK Home Office Survey, one in five people think it is acceptable in some circumstances for a man to hit or slap his wife or girlfriend in response to her being dressed in sexy or revealing clothes in public. And 36% think a woman should be held fully or partly responsible if she is sexually assaulted or raped whilst drunk. Such attitudes are shaped in part by enormously influential social platforms like Facebook, and contribute to victim blaming and the normalisation of violence against women.

Although Facebook claims, in a narrowly-defined defense of free speech, not to be involved in challenging norms or censoring people’s speech, you have in place procedures, terms and community guidelines that you interpret and enforce.Facebook prohibits hate speech and your moderators deal with content that is violently racist, homophobic, Islamophobic, and anti-Semitic every day. Your refusal to similarly address gender-based hate speech marginalizes girls and women, sidelines our experiences and concerns, and contributes to violence against them. Facebook is an enormous social network with more than a billion users around the world, making your site extremely influential in shaping social and cultural norms and behaviors.

Facebook’s response to the many thousands of complaints and calls to address these issues has been inadequate. You have failed to make a public statement addressing the issue, respond to concerned users, or implement policies that would improve the situation. You have also acted inconsistently with regards to your policy on banning images, in many cases refusing to remove offensive rape and domestic violence pictures when reported by members of the public, but deleting them as soon as journalists mention them in articles, which sends the strong message that you are more concerned with acting on a case-by-case basis to protect your reputation than effecting systemic change and taking a clear public stance against the dangerous tolerance of rape and domestic violence.

In a world in which hundreds of thousands of women are assaulted daily and where intimate partner violence remains one of the leading causes of death for women around the world, it is not possible to sit on the fence. We call on Facebook to make the only responsible decision and take swift, clear action on this issue, to bring your policy on rape and domestic violence into line with your own moderation goals and guidelines.

In view of public outrage over people being arrested for making comments or liking posts on Facebook, Centre had issued advisory not to arrest a person in such cases without prior approval of a senior official.

The Supreme Court on Thursday said that no person should be arrested for posting objectionable comments on social networking sites without taking prior permission from senior police officials.

The apex court, which refused to pass an order for a blanket ban on the arrest of a person for making objectionable comments on websites, said state governments should ensure strict compliance of the Centre’s January 9 advisory which said that a person should not be arrested without taking permission from senior police officials.

“We direct the state governments to ensure compliance with the guidelines (issued by Centre) before making any arrest,” a bench of justices B.S.Chauhan and Dipak Misra said.

It said the court cannot pass an order for banning all arrest in such cases as operation of section 66A (pertaining to objectionable comments) of the Information Technology Act has not been stayed by the apex court which is examining its constitutional validity.

In view of public outrage over people being arrested for making comments or liking posts on Facebook, Centre had on January 9 issued advisory to all states and UTs asking them not to arrest a person in such cases without prior approval of a senior police officer.

The advisory issued by the Centre says that, “State governments are advised that as regard to arrest of any person in complaint registered under section 66A of the Information Technology Act, the concerned police officer of a police station may not arrest any person until she/he has obtained prior approval of such arrest from an officer, not below the rank of Inspector General of Police (IGP) in metropolitan cities or of an officer not below the rank of Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCP) or Superintendent of Police (SP) at district level, as the case may be.”

The apex court was hearing an application seeking its direction to the authorities not to take action for posting objectionable comments during the pendency of a case before it pertaining to constitutional validity of section 66A of the Information Technology (IT) Act.

The section states that any person who sends, by means of a computer resource or communication device, any information that was grossly offensive or has a menacing character could be punished with imprisonment for a maximum term of three years, besides imposition of appropriate fine.

The petition was also filed regarding the arrest of a Hyderabad-based woman activist, who was sent to jail over her Facebook post in which certain “objectionable” comments were made against Tamil Nadu Governor K.Rosaiah and Congress MLA Amanchi Krishna Mohan. After filing of the petition, she was released by a district court at Hyderabad.

Jaya Vindhayal, the state general secretary of People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), was arrested on May 12 under section 66A of the IT Act for the “objectionable” post.

According to the police, she had also allegedly distributed pamphlets making objectionable allegations against Rosaiah and Mohan before posting the comments online.

The matter was mentioned before the bench by law student Shreya Singhal, seeking an urgent hearing in the case, saying the police is taking action in such matters even though a PIL challenging validity of section 66A is pending before the apex court.

She had filed the PIL after two girls–Shaheen Dhada and Rinu Shrinivasan–were arrested in Palghar in Thane district under section 66A of IT Act after one of them posted a comment against the shutdown in Mumbai following Shiv Sena leader Bal Thackeray’s death and the other ‘liked’ it.

On November 30, 2012, the apex court had sought response from the Centre on the amendment and misuse of section 66A of IT Act and had also directed the Maharashtra government to explain the circumstances under which the 21-year-old girls were arrested.

Pursuant to the notice issued by the apex court, the Centre had informed it that the controversial provision in the cyber law under which two girls were arrested for Facebook comments did not curb freedom of speech and alleged “high handedness” of certain authorities did not mean that it was bad in law.

The Ministry of Communication and Information Technology in its affidavit had said that an advisory had been issued to all the state governments, saying that due diligence and care may be exercised while dealing with cases arising out of the alleged misuse of cyberspace.

The Maharashtra Government in its reply had said the arrests of girls in Thane district were “unwarranted” and “hasty”, which “cannot be justified“.

The state government had also submitted an affidavit stating that the Thane police SP (Rural) had been suspended for arresting the two girls despite the instruction by the IGP not to take such action.

The court had earlier issued notices and sought responses from governments of Delhi, West Bengal and Puducherry where a professor and a businessman were arrested under section 66A of the Act for a political cartoon and tweeting against a politician respectively.